Twitter via SMS for Rogers

Twitter SMS messages came back to Rogers today with some mixed reviews. Earlier on in the day, I got an tweet from Keith McArthur, who looks like the new Rogers Social Media guy, letting me know that Twitter via SMS is now available to Rogers and Fido customers. I was really excited – not that it impacted directly because I typically tweet using PockeTwit – but because that means that my friends who don't own a smart phone or aren't willing to pay for a data plan can now receive Twitter messages on their phone. It was my understanding that Rogers would treat Twitter messages like they would any other text messages. As far as I could tell, this had minimal financial impact to end-users because as of today, all incoming text messages are free. Other news also trickled about Rogers charging for incoming messages in the future but only for phones that aren't on a text messaging plan. When this news hit, there seem to be a lot of anger as there was a misconception that people were getting bombarded by Twitter messages and having to pay for it. It looks like anger has subsided by the time I'm writing this post. When I was thinking about this, I was a bit baffled by the anger because of a number of reasons. For one, by default, updates to devices are turned off when you follow someone. I actually have to specify to have device notification turned on by each person I follow. This makes sense to me – I don't care to be personally notified on SMS about everyone's status. There are probably only a handful of people I truly care about to be notified. Secondly, it would have been no different than what it was a few months ago just before SMS notification was turned off in Canada and there was an uproar about it. My frustration however is that at 10:30 pm tonight – I still haven't received one SMS update on my phone. Minimal impact to me personally but would be nice if this worked; there are other people I'd like to be able to reach out to via Twitter 😀

Update: 2009-05-08 23:00 – I have been advised to delete device and then reactivate it for SMS to work. Trying to but getting the fail whale. Hopefully will be fixed tomorrow.

Update: 2009-05-09 22:23 – Still no SMS updates although @_gloomybear_ started getting her updates via SMS. Waiting for another 2 more days before I ask for help again. Lack of communication on statuses is disturbing on Twitter